Federal agencies are like horror-movie villains: no matter how many times you try to kill them, no matter how many people promise to end them once and for all, they always seem to keep popping up and scaring the daylights out of people.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is a perfect example. Conservatives in the House and Senate have played Van Helsing to its Dracula since the agency first bared its fangs in 2011, but they have yet to find a wooden stake to kill it.

Approach - Leaders - CFPB - Republican - Appointees

That’s why the approach of the last two leaders of the CFPB, both Republican appointees, has been so important. Mick Mulvaney (who served as acting director from 2017-18) and newly-confirmed Director Kathy Kraninger recognized that given the apparent immortality of the CFPB, the best way to control its power is to make sure it operates within the confines of our constitutional framework: its power must be limited, its actions must be transparent, and it must be independent.

But transparency and true independence run counter to the vision that for new House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and her Democratic colleagues have for CFPB. Those virtues challenge their firm belief in excessive and punitive regulation, as well as the original mission of the bureau as envisioned by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

CFPB - Decade - Warren - Company - Agency

When the CFPB was created nearly a decade ago, Warren and company envisioned an agency that would operate as an anti-business regulation mill to reward left-leaning consumer groups that are key constituencies to the Democratic Party, under the guise of ‘consumer protection’ and ‘independence.’ After all, it is well documented that the bureau’s first director, Richard Corday, used the agency to lay the groundwork for his failed gubernatorial run in Ohio.

Ronald Rubin — a former enforcement attorney at the CFPB — laid out the “rationale”...